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1 month ago

Looks good for a first try! I don't know much about Heartless Hidetsugu, since I've only seen him played once, but I can tell you the one thing you're missing is a way for you to gain an odd amount of life and a way to ping your opponents for an odd amount of damage. You need to make sure they have an even life total and you have an odd life total when you activate Hidetsugu with a damage doubler. I recommend
High Market
and
Miren, the Moaning Well
, since you can activate them, sac'ing your commander with the ability on the stack, and
Pristine Talisman
. You're mono-colored, and this should slide into your manabase without having to give up much.
Kumano, Master Yamabushi
,
Comet Storm
, and
Fireball
are all ways to ping the way you like. I would also check out the page for Hidetsugu and the red staples page at EDHREC.

Glimpse the Unthinkable might be good at a burn mill deck, but the 1->3 CMC to card ratio from Startled AwakeFlip comes close to the 1->5 ratio from glimpse, and it works as a creature on the graveyard, albeit a way overpriced one, but the option is at least there.

What I'm doing is that mill is the backup plan just in case my opponent heals more than I damage. The main plan is to lower life, while using things like Pristine Talisman/Sun Droplet/Dragon's Claw ETB life gain while using bounce duals from lands to facetank hits or stock up on life, etc.

The choice was either to get basic lands or remove artifact fetching from my lands, besides, barely anyone uses land removal.

2 months ago

My Balthor deck was initially a zombie-themed deck until I was tired of it and changed the strategy into a reanimator deck. At first it was just a big mana control deck, with Balthor as a support when your hand was empty and you needed more gas. Slowly it turned into a more combo-control deck with dredge elements.

Over Balthor, Chainer is better in some way: he can target any graveyard, and you don't have problem if your opponents play black and/or red. He can be fast too with more Dark Ritual-like cards, which are more-or-less dead cards if you don't play combo.

So I prefer Balthor because it fits more what I'm looking for this deck: big reanimation turns with a high creature count.

For many years, Chainer was in my Balthor deck as a backup plan. He was finally cut for more faster reanimation options.

I've tested Black Market. For me, it's a 5-manas do-nothing the turn it comes into play. Too slow. It also attracts hate from your opponents. I suggest it if you play Exsanguinate or Torment of Hailfire. I don't because I try to increase my creature count for more Balthor efficiency.

Noxious Gearhulk: I like it too, but can't find a free slot for it at the moment.

Marionette Master: It better fits in an artifact deck. If it's played for its token, there are more effective ways to produce tokens in black.

Pristine Talisman occurrence in decks from the last year

Commander / EDH:

All decks: 0.21%

Red: 0.08%

Blue: 0.03%

White: 0.06%

Black: 0.03%

W/B (Orzhov): 0.28%

W/U/B (Esper): 0.11%

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